Little lessons I’ve learned… and opinions I hold

Website sliders are stupid
When it comes to websites, home page sliders are a poor idea. First of all, it shows that you don’t know what the priorities of your site are. What makes you stand out? What is the biggest reason people are visiting your site? What is the most important product/service you offer? This thing should be loud and clear on your home page. Sliders allow you to be wishy washy about the important aspects of your site. The result? You add more pictures and descriptions and suddenly, your website is the equivalent of a Cheesecake Factory menu. (I refuse to eat there because of their over-extensive menu.) Customers – and your site visitors – should be faced with as few decisions as possible. Secondly, sliders require a viewer’s time and often, when people are browsing the web, they couldn’t care less about staying 5 seconds and waiting for the slider to change. And if it changes before they’ve read all the information, they’ll give up. It’s that simple. Think about it. When was the last time you sat on a homepage and clicked through to see all the images in the slider? Likely never. Finally, everyone is doing sliders. I’m going to blame it on WordPress templates (and don’t get me wrong – WordPress can be great!), but if everyone is doing it, what makes you think you’ll stand out? That’s what marketing is: making yourself stand out above the rest of the competition. And website sliders? Frankly, they don’t make the cut.

Don’t make bad design. And especially, don’t offer it to customers.
If you don’t want it in your portfolio, don’t lay it out on the table in front of a client. If you offer a client a beautiful design and a bad design, they’ll most likely choose the bad design. (*note: this isn’t because clients are stupid. It’s actually just karma, coming back to bite you for offering them bad design in the first place.) Now maybe you’ll disagree with me on this, but if you explain to a client why the design they’ve sketched doesn’t quite work when in execution and they still want what they want, there are plenty of other firms willing to make bad design for them. And you? Don’t cave. It’s better to lose customers than have your name attached to ugly work. Now, I’m not saying to never please your customers and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t take their opinions and inspirations into consideration as you do the work. I’m simply saying that there’s a reason they hired a designer to design their logo/website/business cards and if they wanted to do it their way, they could easily have done it themselves.

Design quote —Vasari

“I know it is an opinion commonly accepted among almost all writers that sculpture, as well as painting, was first discovered in nature by the peoples of Egypt; and that some others attribute to the Chaldeans the first rough carvings in marble and the first figures in relief; just as still others assign to the Greeks the invention of the brush and the use of colour. But I would say that design, the basis of both arts, or rather the very soul which conceives and nourishes within itself all the aspects of the intellect, existed in absolute perfection at the origin of all other things when God on High, having created the great body of the world and having decorated the heavens with its brightest lights, descended with His intellect further down into the clarity of the atmosphere and the solidity of the earth, and, shaping man, discovered in the pleasing invention of things the first form of sculpture and painting.”

—Vasari in ‘Preface to the Lives’ from the book, The Lives of the Artists

So excited!

Made a lot of progress today! Click on a person to contact and a popup box appears to contact them. Kaboom!! I'm pretty much doing a happy dance right now. Or maybe that's a potty dance since I've been sitting here so long without moving trying to figure this out…

Also did some work on the home page for the main website. Hopefully I can get a higher res picture for the final site, but the club has a surprising lack of photos at my disposal.

Making progress!!

Updated homepage for WGMS juniors. 

Italia

I have applied and been accepted to study abroad in Italy for 3 weeks during summer break. I will earn 6 credit hours and will finish my non-major studio classes! I am working hard to fundraise to help pay for my trip. I am making these really fun notebooks which are for sale. Currently, small notebooks are $15 and large ones are $30. The easiest way to buy is to give on my GoFundMe (or if you see me regularly, you can pay in person). If you pay through GoFundMe, you will need to add an additional $5 for site fees and shipping.

Update

Well, I have nothing visually to show for the progress I’ve been making with the website even though I’ve been busting my butt and working hard.

In CSS, the {position} tag has some sort of bug. When I positioned the search bar to be in the right place, hyperlink functionality of the nav bar would disappear. I spent hours diagnosing the problem, trying to figure out if it was the JS or the HTML or the search bar itself… I finally discovered that the {position:relative} property was causing the problem, so I spent another chunk of time rearranging HTML elements into a different nav bar format, so I could use the {float:right} property instead. Finally fixed that bug.

My biggest problem currently is programing a stylesheet nav bar/basic content in one HTML page that can be accessed in all the pages so that code doesn’t have to be copied into every file. This is driving me bonkers. I’ve tried numerous tutorials to no avail.

Next step is to get down to the nitty gritty of JavaScript and really figure out what I’m doing so I can get that function working. It will take time, but it will also save time in the future if I learn it now.

Website Redesign – first stage of website coding

Here is the primary design with basic header elements included in the website. CSS is lacking as you can see, but it’s slowly getting there...

HTML code:

CSS code:

Website Redesign – Home page design prototype

I’ve continued work on the website design and have made a lot of progress – I’ll demonstrate some of the HTML and CSS code in the next post. This shows the main design of the homepage for the both the adult website and the portion of the site for kids. I refined the color scheme on the kids’ portion of the site and have been working on adding clickable content for users to draw them into the rest of the site.

This page only demonstrates how the “breadcrumb” trail bar works to show users where they are in the site:

Kids’ portion of the site:

Nelson Atkins

This weekend, my roommate and I took a trip to the Nelson Atkins. Here are some photos of some of the art I loved most. Some are chosen for rich colors, other for craft and just plain amazement, and others simply because I am interested in the subject(s).